Magnus is not just a chess player anymore. He is a chess tycoon, an owner of the significant portion of chess business. Power corrupts people.

"I'm not saying Hans Niemann cheated in this very specific instance against me. I'm just saying he's a professional cheater, and that fact may or may not be related to my withdrawal in a game against him after just one move."

Carlsen is all but accusing Niemann of having cheated against him. Why can't he go the extra step? Is this something his lawyers have advised him to do? (I don't have a dog in this fight)

I don’t like this. You can’t just imply someone is cheating without proof or some indication of proof. I understand we need to crack down on cheating but this is not the way.

Isn't this like saying we should abandon professional road cycling as a sport, because motorcycles have been invented and exist and are a faster method of two wheeled transportation?

Or we should abandon rowing as a sport because we now have 9hp Honda outboard motors?

Well very many people think it's fun to watch sports or other competitions regardless of if a robot could do it better. I don't think anybody cares about if its "solved" or not, it's just fun to see humans interact in a controlled dramatic way I guess.

Chess also has the added bonus of providing a lot of interesting puzzles for those interested, they can sit and analyze lines with engines after the games as well or watch Agadmator on YouTube analyze it. It's fun!

A car can go faster than Usain Bolt yet I'm still going to watch him. If you were familiar with chess culture, you would already be aware of the appeal of human chess champions. If anything, the sport has grown enormously in the last few years. What ismprobably going to decline is the relative focus on OTB Classical.

Chess is far from solved, either. AlphaZero's play has actually led to the emergence of additional theory.

> It's (mostly) a solved game for f* sake, move on.

This is completely incorrect. We have fully solved chess with 7 pieces, and 8-piece tablebases are in progress. The initial chess position has 64 pieces, and solving gets exponentially harder as more pieces are added.

> We (as humans) can't beat computers.

We can't beat cars at races either yet competitive foot races still exist.

With regards to his recent rating increase, Hans' rating increase is not completely unprecedented but it's still very rare. The issue isn't that he's a mid-2600s player, or even that he's increased by 200 points in two years, it's the shape of the ratings graph and the unusual staircase progress he's made at the GM level.

It took Hans about five years to go from 2300 to 2500 rating, and most of that was pre-pandemic. Increasing your rating gets exponentially more difficult as your rating increases, which is why there are so few players who ever make it to the 2700 level or even the 2600 level. Most players at this level who spend multiple years in a rating lull never significantly increase their playing ability (there are countless examples, but look at someone like MVL for a typical example). There are only a small number of cases of people who reach Hans' level who have staircase looking ratings progress graphs at the 2500+ level.

Hans' recent rating increase is far from proof that he's cheating, but it is definitely extremely unusual.

>I can understand being suspicious of online games. Fair enough. But the evidence for cheating offline is...

How can people act like the evidence of online cheating doesn't affect the likelihood that he cheated OTB? This is the exact same person playing both games.

Circumstantial evidence is still evidence

>the fact that Carlsen is making this statement now and not weeks earlier is embarrassing

Why?

Yeah, the tone I'm getting from reading this basically boils down to "I was uncomfortable with how he played so I quit". Isn't that part of the metagaming in chess? Poker has always been about unnerving your opponent through stoicism or deception. I don't see why chess can't have the same layer of subtlety, and if it really concerns him then he should be able to wear a visor to block everything but the game board. Otherwise, just take your loss and stand your ground.

The fact that Magnus fully understand all the implications of such a statement and still went forward with this speaks to how sure he is of his intuition. He will forever tarnish his reputation if ultimately it's proven that he was simply flat out wrong. He is basically saying that Hans is playing impossibly well and that he does not exhibit the same behavioral patterns as any other player. And that he also has access to some other incriminating info that he can't yet share.

In what sense is he trying to be judge, jury, and executioner? It seems to me that he is resigning games and not trying to get those results changed. Do you mean the fact that he is arguably using his position in the chess world to influence organizing bodies to change their rules? That might be the case, but I don’t think that’s bad or wrong in principle.

> I am disappointed with Magnus. He is misusing the weight of his reputation even if cheating is a big deal in chess.

I think the unspoken truth but also the thing both chess.com and Magnus are hinting at is that Niemann has cheated a lot more than he lets on, perhaps his entire stream was built on cheating, who knows. But chess.com can't just start sharing information like that, and they are walking a fine line just with their public statement where they affirmatively assert that Niemann is underplaying the reality of his cheating. Magnus probably has insider information from chess.com but is bound by NDA and this is also why he's now challenging Niemann to give him permission to speak on the matter.

Yeah, I think Magnus is making a mistake conflating two things. It is totally fine to think that Nieman should have been punished more for online cheating, but combining it with his accusation of cheating at the Sinquefield Cup come off as sour grapes. Watching the Crypto Cup there was obviously no love lost between the two of them but they played each other, it's not until Magnus losses to Hans (which based on their rating had about a 5% chance of happening) that this refusal to play happens.

I am very sorry to see this position being posted. Niemann has been caught cheating in chess twice before, less than three years ago. He should never have been allowed to play in the cup. It was FIDE's decision not to collect the concrete evidence that would have caught him in the first place, and we must make do with the circumstantial evidence. As it stands, Niemann is a demonstrated cheater, and has more to gain by cheating in a game against the world champion than at any other time. It is very unlikey that Hans only cheated exactly the two times he was caught, and his failure to produce other instances than the times when he was caught are a mark against him.

Remember that we are not giving him the death penalty, we are just trying to establish which scenario is more likely. It is important to be able to render most likely judgments based on incomplete information. Its not a courtroom.

From the horse's mouth:

"I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective."

---

Personally I don't think that's strong enough reason to convince me that Niemann is a cheat. However, I would love to see more evidence before I change my position on this issue.

The somewhat-concrete evidence is that analyzers have now found many instances where Niemann's moves correlate highly with engine-suggested moves.

I don't know the details as to whether that claim is credible. Is this correlation really any more for Niemann than any other grandmaster of similar strength? Are the analyzers cherry-picking data points that fit the narrative? And of course it is possible that Niemann is legitimately that good.

Reddit's /r/chess has loads of viewpoints and speculation, if you want to read more there.

"Buddy was acting strange, must be cheating".

Nobody knows how he was cheating. Without a strip search there's no way to be sure.

It is known that it's not technologically impossible. There are ways to do it, some of them rather outlandish but not infeasible.

Unfortunately, that's as far as it can go. Either you start doing something really extreme to ensure that players can't cheat (that aforementioned strip search, making them play in a Faraday cage, etc), you'll never really know.

Even worse than that, the cheating may not have gone on during the match. It could have been as simple as old-fashioned spying: studying what preparations Carlsen had made, and learning their weaknesses before the match even starts.

You can't really prevent that. The best you can hope for is for a chess expert to opine that this move seems like an unlikely thing for a human to play without the assistance of a computer. Carlsen is just such an expert, but obviously his opinion alone is much too biased.

Remote control anal beads is the cheapest, easiest to conceal and readily available.

Doesn't really prevent the usage of vibrating anal beads (https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h...)

Everyone in the audience has to be in their shorts, and the players need to be surrounded by one-way mirrors otherwise someone in the audience could use a computer and signal the players.

I can think of at least one way to cheat that would not be detectable by any of the screening methods I've seen suggested so far, but that only works if the cheaters can get reasonably private access to the venue before the match to hide some equipment. (I'm not going to go into details).

Playing a match in a big venue like MSG that holds numerous other events would make doing this easier. There are concerts there for example that involve bands setting up a lot of equipment. Get some of your chess team members to take temporary jobs on the crews setting up some of those shows and you might have a good chance of sneaking your chess cheating equipment in.

I think what you want to do with this kind of match is play each game in a different venue, and the players do not find out where the venue is until it is time for them to be taken there (on transportation arranged by the organizers) for the game. The player's teams are not told where the venue was until after the game.

If a player is going to cheat then it has to be done via something entirely contained on/in the player.

Maybe even have some of the games played on the move. E.g., the players are driven to an airport, board a chartered jet, and play their game in flight while the jet just flies around over a wide area.

Carlson already has enough $ to retire, and he certainly would have nothing to gain from such a "spectacle for the masses". His place as #1 in the world (and arguably, history) is not threatened by Hans.

Inside a faraday cage, turn it into the world's first cage match.

There are hidden headphones which can be inserted in the ear and contact ear drum directly. Totally invisible. And this is a mainstream cheap tech today, students use them at exams.

Also in the public setting he wouldn't even need any device on him, he'll simply have an accomplice showing signs.

Just make sure it takes long enough for any battery to drain.

A key fact to understand in thinking about cheating in over the board chess: a strong player can defeat a much stronger opponent with just 1-3 hints per game indicating the strongest move. For example, most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player. Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.

Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions. So, this is possible. Moreover, one needn't carry a device on themselves. A cheater may have accomplices providing hints, if they carry a device.

It will be interesting to see how chess tournaments, as well as FIDE, chess.com, and other major chess institutions react to this situation. The potential for cheating has now been brought to the absolute forefront of chess discussion. And Carlsen's actions have been questioned by FIDE in recent interviews, with FIDE staff condemning "vigilantism" of a kind.

Some set of resolutions seems necessary--perhaps standards for security in major chess tournaments, perhaps an alliance to share cheating or reliability data amongst major chess operations, perhaps a standard term in major chess tournament agreements that no previously identified cheaters (online or otherwise) will be allowed to play, and perhaps sanctions in some form against Carlsen (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges).

Imagine you know someone with a history of stealing cars and other valuable objects. He has been caught multiple times. Now you see him with a shiny new car that you’re pretty sure he can’t afford.

Did he steal it? Not necessarily — it’s entirely possible that he got a higher-paying legit job and saved up for it, or inherited money from a relative, or got it legally in some other way. He shouldn’t be convicted of a new crime with no other evidence just because he committed similar crimes in the past.

However, it would be entirely natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation of the facts, and to avoid trusting that person.

This is basically what happened with Hans. He has been caught cheating multiple times, and then had an unusually fast rise in rating. Is that rise impossible? No. But it’s consistent with cheating, and given his history, cheating is the simplest explanation.

So it would be totally normal for Magnus to refuse to trust such a person even though it can’t be conclusively proven that he’s still dirty. But even then, Magnus agreed to play against him, until further circumstantial evidence came to light and it just got to be too much.

So, is it possible that Hans is clean? Sure. If that’s indeed the case, do I feel sorry for him? No. He made the choice to destroy his own reputation when he cheated multiple times. If he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt now, it’s on him.

I believe people might be seriously underestimating just how good Magnus may be at detecting cheating.

Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now?

He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.

I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented sooner or later.

Some interesting meta observations for the few people who read my comment in this already enormous thread. I noticed that opinions on the issue seemed split rather 50/50 until I started seeing the same couple of names over and over on the "no evidence of cheating" side. And in fact, searching the HTML document for this page for a particularly prolific name yields that they make up about 10% of all posts in the thread.

I'm not sure why someone would respond to dozens of all comment threads, but the different tones of voice, presented familiarity with the topic, between posts are disconcerting. I've never accused anyone of being a bot or shill (nor am I now) because I've seen starry-eyed true believers of just about every cause, idea, and entity, but this behavior is exceptionally unusual.

This whole situation is _not_ a Hans problem…it’s a FIDE problem. They don’t know how to reliably adjudicate claims of cheating, so it ends up being a massive game of “he said he said.” As the game gets more popular, they have a tremendous amount of work to do to guarantee game integrity – not unlike the work baseball had to do with steroids.

If other world top-50 players even think Hans cheated and got away with it, it creates an open door for lots more unscrupulous players to look for their own cheating schemes. We need to stop being so focused on a 19-year-old child and start asking chess organizers some hard questions about what they are planning to do to guarantee clean chess.

Here is a crazy idea.

If you get caught cheating, even once, you should be banned for life.

Otherwise we end up in a lose-lose situation.

It’s almost impossible for Magnus to prove Niemann cheated on that game.

It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat.

But shouldn’t matter. He was caught cheating before, he shouldn’t have been allowed to compete again.

I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass

Edit: Replies seem to focus on my examples. Forget about them. Proposition stands. If you are old enough to compete you are old enough to be banned for life if you cheat. Online or OTB.

Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans. He has stated before that merely having suspicions (e.g. based on past cheating as in Niemann's case) about your opponent possibly cheating completely ruins one's mentality during a game.

He simply wants to avoid going through that, which imo is understandable.

There are two things that must be understood before making any judgement on this case:

1. It is solidly within the realm of possibility that a person who spends all his time devoted to succeeding in tournament chess would be able to devise a cheating method that cannot be easily detected by standard protocols

2. It is impossible to prove a negative, so it is impossible to disprove Magnus' claims

With these things being said, it is both possible that Hans didn't cheat and we'll never know for sure, or that he did cheat and we'll never know how. Given these facts, the most productive analysis would be to find just how unusual Hans' performance, both in the game and prior, really was.

A few things could be determined:

1. How many other high level players have a history of cheating? Have any players who have once cheated in a lower stakes match later been proven to have cheated in a higher stakes one?

2. Based on improvement per game played, how unusually rapid was Hans' development in the past 2 years? Are there other players which have progressed as rapidly as he has despite having progressed slower earlier in their careers?

3. Do all the engine correlation analyses that implicate Hans not fire warning signals when analysis any other game by confirmed non-cheaters? Do they signal cheating in a similar way when analyzing games of proven cheaters?

Hans is clearly cheating. Comparing his past games against what an engine would do is pretty damning. Chess engines are far superior to players and the best players in the world top out in the high 70s percent correlations (Magnus averages around 70%).

Hans has a string of games at 100% correlation[0], meaning he's playing perfect games. Past players who achieved this later went on to admit to cheating[1]. Magnus knows this because he owns part of chess.com and presumably sees the data.

Magnus has a lot riding on his statement. He wouldn't make it unless he was sure.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfPzUgzrOcQ

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Feller

In case you haven't seen it, some new evidence surfaced yesterday: https://youtu.be/jfPzUgzrOcQ

Chess is, in a way, doomed. At this point cheating by a smart perpetrator is nearly impossible to detect. - Miniature devices can even be implanted. You can probably already have a chess engine onboard your body. - Accomplices of a cheater only need to transmit a few bits of information to be useful - making cheating cheap when audience is allowed. - Statistical methods will not be able to detect a player increasing their apparent skill by a small margin (help with occasional moves, successively picking suggestions from a varied group of chess engines so that adherence to one engine cannot be proven)

Given this, we will be left with cheaters getting caught rarely through obvious slips in op-sec (device falls out, gets picked by a detector through unlucky occurrence)

or

We will be forever accusing people of cheating. They will deny it. We will ask them to explain why they made certain moves. They will fail to explain themselves sufficiently... Are we here yet?

It’s a deeply unsatisfactory situation, because on one side we expect evidence for such a serious accusation, and on the other side we know such evidence is all but impossible to gather retrospectively.

I have no opinions on the actual event given I have no clue what the details are.

But accusing someone of cheating without any concrete evidence doesn’t sit well with me. It creates a situation where it declares all exceptional cases impossible. It’s impossible for growth. It’s impossible that someone could lose to a weaker player.

I suspect that people are able to say “even without concrete evidence, this is astronomically unlikely and the simplest explanation by far is that they cheated.”

Nevertheless, it all just doesn’t quite sit right with me. There’s something manifestly unpalatable about saying, “they cheated because surely nobody could ever do that.”

Please don’t see this comment as something that warrants explanation for why the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. I’m not really interested in the merits of this specific case. I’m also probably doing a poor job communicating this feeling I struggle myself to understand.

Why are known cheaters even allowed to participate in top level tournaments? It’s insulting to all the other chess players.

Magnus is setting the right example by refusing to play Niemann

For all the people defending Hans, he has admitted to cheating in real, official, prize money online tournaments, and chess.com believes that in his apology he still lied about the extent of his cheating.

Maybe Hans did cheat OTB, maybe he didn't, but the tough part about reputation is it is very hard to build and very easy to break. And Hans had proven to the world that he would cheat.

I personally don't think Hans did cheat in that particular tournament but at the same time I don't think he deserves too much sympathy. Cheaters literally destroy the game, and Hans at the very least was a cheater.

It's very remarkable that Carlsen is suspicious of Niemann's game against him in Sinquefield, since there's a clear consensus among other top chess players that there was absolutely nothing unusual about it (or at least about the moves played).

"I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do."

That's a mere gut feeling, how on earth is Niemann supposed to defend against such a vague allegation? Magnus is a world-class competitor not only in chess but also in fantasy football and even quite decent at poker, so it stands to reason that he knows a thing or two about statistics and game theory. I was hoping he'd have far more concrete evidence than what he shared in this statement (like maybe he was playing a game that he'd deliberately prepared to test how long Niemann will take to compute certain hard-to-spot key moves; even that would still be extremely vague, but at least give Niemann something to concretely address). He is such an outstanding brain that I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he needs to produce concrete evidence.

In the end Magnus hints that he has more to share, and I hope he will do so soon. Otherwise I don't see how we could get to any sort of satisfying resolution here (short of Niemann suddenly confessing, which seems unlikely, and we still don't have evidence that he has anything to confess at all).

The questions I have about this are pretty basic:

1. How would Niemann have cheated? The shoe computer theory is a bit far fetched - are devices that small capable enough? Is he suspected of having an accomplice?

2. Why didn't Magnus just say something right away? He could have easily made his accusations at the moment to event organizers - quietly - and they could have had Niemann remove his shoes or something. Instead he threw a tantrum. Obviously this isn't just about Hans.

Personally, I think Niemann is just a 19yo kid who has made mistakes and Carlsen is a 31yo professional who is absolutely hammering this kid to make a larger point. He may be frustrated, but taking it out on Hans is a bit much. The imbalance of power here is just off the charts.

Even if Hans somehow cheated in that OTB game - of which there isn't a shred of real evidence - Magnus is the leader of the chess world and needs to accept that responsibility and react in a mature way. He should have taken the high road, simply said "I don't know what happened, but it was highly unusual. Let's guarantee that this doesn't happen in the future," and directed his frustrations totally at the event organizers rather than encouraging the entire world to attack this one kid.

This is a farce. All credibility has been lost when you have to scan players like you scan people when entering a plane.

Chess is touted as an ingenious game when it is little more than a brute-force search with simple prune and huge amounts of memorization.

I would argue that most GMs would easily play up to 200-300 elo points below their current level with little to no practice. But they spend decades of their lives memorizing and memorizing just to get the highest rating they can. And it is diminishing returns --- if you spent 1000 hours memorizing to get 100 points, the next 1000 hours will only get you 50 points. And when you reach your peak --- be prepared to keep memorizing forever just to stay there and inevitably drop when you reach a certain age.

What a waste of intelligence.

It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960. This would greatly devalue memorization and make chess a brute-force-search-with-simple-prune game once again, as it was meant to be. But that's exactly the problem; if you are at the top after doing all this memorization you don't want to throw it away! In fact, your memorization might be better than your calculation in which case you will be surpassed by other players.

Magnus is not doing this in the best possible way.

If Hans is cheating (possible, especially given his past) Magnus should act and use his connections in the Chess world to catch him cheating.

Suspicion is not proof.

Using his reputation as leverage can work to destroy Hans's reputation, but there is a high risk of collateral damages.

He should be smarter than that.

Hungary already solved this, it's harder to cheat in a bath in swimsuit: https://www.awl-images.com/cache/pcache2/00042940.jpg

What i think should happen is, Hans should play in tournaments which have much more security, and play against Magnus. If he did cheat it should be really obvious because his performance will suddenly drop. If he didn’t than he will play the same, but now with the added security he won’t have to face unbacked accusations, and there is no excuse for Magnus to refuse to play with Hans like he has been doing now.

Even if Hans really did cheat, if there is no credible evidence you can’t fault him. And IMO it’s not enough that he cheated many years ago. Right now all the criticism he’s getting is unfair because it’s based on speculation.

In this thread, people who have no idea how chess engines work, hell, even just how the game of chess works, are taking centipawn analysis, engine correlation and various other metrics to support their claims. Anyone who has studied with engines for a decent amount of time knows those numbers themselves are often misleading as just statistics.

To be clear, I'm not supporting either side of the debate, I'm just stating that people are throwing in numbers in a confident and convincing tone without understanding what those numbers mean.

It's not convincing to say that Hans was cheating because few people can beat Magnus playing black when Magnus was playing poorly in that game. I still feel like more information that could come out at any moment that could swing the situation in either direction, and this statement doesn't say much. I wish Magnus and chess.com would come out with whatever extra information they have.

Speaking seriously, how plausible is a teledildonics-based ruse? (context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477)

Would a thoughtfully designed device be detectable via the pre-screening methods at OTB tournaments? You only need to send a few bits of information to swing a chess game.

Magnus' evidence of "it didn't seem like he was thinking very hard during critical junctures" is the nail in the coffin for me.

If he has a history of stealing cars AND his new car is hot wired? Possible it's legal? Sure. Let's not twist our hands about a grand theft auto charge, however.

My issue with this is that it's all circumstantial evidence. If you suspect someone of cheating but can't show it, then enact some anti-cheating provisions and move on. We can't have a rule of law based on just the suspicions of interested parties.

I'm not sure if letting the chess players be the arbiters of this is the best course of action though.

found the car analogy

That's not a complete analogy tho. Everyone knows Hans cheated in the past. But Magnus is going beyond that and saying that Hans cheated in the over-the-board game against him.

Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also has income tax returns that show that he has a legit source of income. Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?

Hans is known to have cheated, his coach is known to have cheated, add low security in the event, Hans beating Magnus (a player two tiers above him) on black pieces (Magnus has lost only 15 games against black in an entire world champion career) and Hans acting suspicious during the game and here we are.

Magnus is obviously extremely qualified to detect cheating, I see many other people who are honestly just as qualified as him say that Hans isn't cheating. I'm going to also say emotions are going to play a massive role here, both in terms of defence of Hans and against Hans.

The interesting thing is the one party MORE qualified than Magnus and the other grandmasters to detect cheating is the chesscom statistics team and they think Hans has cheated online recently and didn't admit to it. Still, there's no smoking gun that proves the OTB matches were fixed, Hans can be innocent at least in those specific circumstances, but if he's been guilty in online chess recently is it truly fair to make the world champion play against him OTB?

>He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.

It is pretty important to realise in terms of Magnus's mindset he has given up on defending the world championship and doing anything other than achieving 2900 elo, the highest rating ever achieved. He is a champion, and that is his goal in life, he wants that rating in a way most people can't fathom. If he proves Hans Neimann is a cheater, Han's win's against Magnus are void, and Magnus's rating goes up. Imagine being the world champion and having your dream drift further away because of a known cheater beating you when they're at a disadvantage, what goes through your head? What goes through your head when you think of how many people COULD be cheating and making getting 2900 impossible? What can others do about the spectre of chess cheating, the world champion, doesn't stand up?

So what I'm saying here is, I wouldn't be super confident that Magnus wouldn't throw his reputation in the trash to become the greatest chess player who ever lived. I think he would absolutely throw away his reputation, but not for nothing.

It was obvious that Hans did not make a real effort while playing chess with Magnus. Hans was not concentrating. Hans was constantly moving his hand, covering his mouth. Hans was not paying attention.

Mangus is human after all, who occassionally make blunders of sub-GM levels: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=magnus+chess+bl...

That just shows that he is fallible, which I empathize with.

Also don't forget the bishop blunder by Nepo in the world championship against Magnus. That was a 1800 level blunder trapping the bishop. Nepo is in top 5 GM list.

The fact of the matter is that all GMs including Magnus have the potential to make blunders.

This. It’s like how some people in here have built amazing intuition about where a bug in a system may be, even if it’s a system they haven’t written or designed themselves

I was agreeing with your complete post, except for the last line.

No more evidence is required. The quality of Hans Niemann's moves, recently as well as during his rise from 2400-rating three years ago, is enough evidence against him.

Either he is a good as Stockfish, or ...

He's clearly stated he rarely ever trains with computers

I think this is another example of the very common pattern of 90% of the contributions in online discourse come from 10% of the population with 90% of post coming from a 1% minority of the overall population. It's not unusual at all.

I am into chess, was studying it, have read few books on chess.

People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.

Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.

50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.

No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?

The issue is fairly split. I saw a poll recently: yes and no were split, but "I don't know" took up a large majority.

I don't think it's too surprising that some people have strong opinions about this matter either.

This is against terms of use here, many of us have been nailed stating similar for other posts. The guideline is "assume the best" (or something like that).

Astroturfing and manufacturing consent / mass manipulation is stupidly common here, and on reddit.

Probably just someone with a strong opinion tbh

Maybe you're talking about me. I don't even like Hans. I just think people are morons for spewing bile that harms someone's real life.

I know a little bit about the situation (though not an expert - I haven't researched it a ton, just tried to think critically about the situation) due to the fact that yeah, drama is entertaining. But I also think what the WC is doing is disgusting - he is using his position of power to harm someone, and doesn't have much evidence, really, none at all, other than him saying "trust me."

Also, the parallels between this and political discord are really interesting to me, and I wish I were smart enough to boil that down on a sociological level and express myself but unfortunately I am not.

I didn't know anything about Hans until Magnus dropped out of the tournament and this all started. I follow chess, and I didn't even know (consciously, I am sure I heard it and didn't take close note) at the time that he beat Magnus, until he dropped out.

I probably should not care too much, and do something more useful with my time, but it is super annoying to me that people are spreading misinformation to such a degree and no one seems to really care that that this can really impact someone's life.

On top of that, I strongly do not believe that someone should be branded for life due to their past actions.

Do you even need to search the HTML? Just a generic find of the browser's search will reveal the same info. Not sure why you'd need to go to that trouble.

at the time I read this and replied, your comment was top of the stack. without reading the full comments, i'm already reading your comment as someone that's got their knickers in a twist rather than reading a substantive comment. so hopefully that's what you wanted?

Permanent ban is standard punishment for cheating in lots of things in life. It's bizarre to me that it's not so in chess. Was he only caught while under 18. I can understand giving a second chance to children.

Steroids aren't even the best analogy. If you get caught with those, you get punished, but eventually you're allowed to play again. Cheating with an engine is more like fixing the game, which is usually a life time ban in most sports.

Lance’s case is interesting. Cheating is (was?) rampant in cycling. As Bill Burr joked “our roided up guy beat your roided up guy, what’s the big deal?”

I don’t think chess is as bad as cycling. Doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but gives some perspective

Fair. However Hans's defence was that 1) he'd never cheated in professional contexts and 2) he was young and stupid.

These seem like fair qualifications to your proposition.

Lance wasn't 16 and Hans didn't win multiple championships becoming the best chess player of all time.

Well the best way for Hans to prove he didn’t cheat is to give amazing analysis after the game demonstrating his super-elite chess thinking. Unfortunately, he often sounds like someone who did nothing on a group project trying to explain how it works to the professor.

I know this isn’t proof he cheated, but it doesn’t do him any favors when he’s already under suspicion.

Edit: Way back, decades ago, in Warcraft 2, I became strong enough to regularly get accused of cheating by people who weren’t familiar with me. However the converse side of this is I was extremely accurate at detecting actual cheating.

> I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass

I do not want to suggest anything here, just side note that there are cases in cycling when someone was cheating and than suspended/relegated but without life ban like Alberto Contador in Tour de France 2010.

> It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat.

Niemann doesn't have to approve such a thing. It falls on the accuser to prove that the accused is guilty.

Playing Poker, if you are caught cheating, you are barred for life at least in the platform you were caught. And I agree with that.

Nieman was never caught cheating OTB

Some other GMs mentioned the same thing, having doubts whether the opponent is cheating or not makes you play differently (if they blunder, you might consider it could be a really deep engine line).

That's understandable, but if that's the case then I believe the most likely scenario is that Magnus has lost legitimately to Niemann twice.

Any opponent could cheat at anytime. Cheating in chess is a fact of life, and can't be stopped. Other professional sports have mostly come to terms with this, and chess needs to as well.

When you have proof of cheating the sport's authorities take action (not individual players). When you don't you let the games go on knowing some folks are getting away with it sometimes.

> Magnus isn't trying to be judge, jury and executioner by refusing to play Hans.

Yes, he most definitely is and the rest of your comment doesn’t disprove that in any way.

Magnus isn’t trying to be judge, jury and executioner. He has just decided that the guy is irrevocably a cheater and as a sentence he will never play a game against him again.

That "100%" analysis is very deeply flawed. The author of the video even issued a retraction (https://twitter.com/IglesiasYosha/status/1574308784566067201...).

It's cherry-picked games and it doesn't compare to the "engine correlation" of other high ranked players against similar opponents. I would not rely on it as evidence that Hans is "clearly cheating."

When I was younger, I spent many, many hours playing one particular video game. I became a “known cheater” at the game, despite never actually cheating (I’d cheated at other games in my early teens, but had since given up that lifestyle).

I can recall several players on discussion boards analysing my statistics and explaining how I was clearly cheating because it was impossible for a human to play like me. Humans, they said, just weren’t that accurate.

One cheat-detection algorithm even “caught” me one day, and I was promptly banned from that server. Confused about what had happened, I sought out the server documentation online so I could see what they had used to “detect” me. My crime, it turns out, was scoring too many kills per second.

I keep this in mind whenever I see another person accused of something similar. Sometimes people have just put in more effort and study than we choose to comprehend.

Agreed. His ELO improvement alone is evidence enough imo.

His rating plateaued around 2300 from end of 2015 to mid 2018. Then in the last 2 years, I believe his improvement from 2400 to 2700 is the most rapid in history.

If you compare his rating with other young players like Duda, Firouzja, Gukesh - then his rating increase looks very unique.

I'm not aware of any chess prodigies that have followed a trajectory quite like this. So maybe Hans is an unusual talent. Or maybe, he's receiving computer assistance.

Daniel Rensch and others have said that Magnus has not seen chesscom cheating algorithms or lists. It had been a rumor in the chess world for a while that Hans has cheated before

You mean Magnus?

In one of those games, Nieman was losing by 1.3 points in the first 10 moves despite being 100% according to this analysis so I'll take it with a grain of salt. This only looks at having moves within the top 3 engine moves done by one of the engines tested, and sometimes there's just 1-2 good moves so doing 1 out of 10 (or whatever) possible moves doesn't mean you did anything good. Further, it's unclear how cherry-picked it is. If it was that obvious I'd think the other analysis would've caught it which they didn't.

You can find more discussion of it on reddit, but the threads are generally all over the place.

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xofl99/one_of_the_10...

This analysis has since been retracted after a wide variety of people explained to her that she was misunderstanding fundamentals of how to do this.

The discussion on /r/chess is pretty good.

While interesting, this does not seem very convincing to me. They successfully show that Niemann was playing many games with a high percentage of "engine perfect" moves, but they do not do enough to show that this is inconsistent with what top players usually do. A whole distribution of scores is shown for Niemann but only limited summary statistics are shown for other top players. A proper comparison would involve showing the same type of data for both.

That's hardly evidence.

Me, as a 1600 player, have played some 0-0-0 games on Lichess. I didn't cheat. I just play a lot of chess games and during those games, my opponent was really bad, so I had a perfect game (according to the engine).

This is complete garbage. Real statistical analysis has been done, and has been inconclusive so far. Cherry picking games is ridiculous - at the 2800 level, a GM will only deviate from the engine's top moves 0-3 times. It would be expected that an exceptional performance would remain within top engine moves if someone was able to play at that level.

Yeah this is interesting … she shows that Hans had many tournaments where he shows record setting move accuracy as measured by correlation to Stockfish 15, and that 6 of these tournaments occurred in a row. She also shows that for those tournaments even by Reagans model, Hans results would be like a 1/70000 chance if legit.

The key point (in the end) seems to be that the odds for a streak like Niemann had are about 1 in 80k. Statistically speaking, I'd say that's a long shot from a smoking gun. Here's a good rundown of a case where a cheater is considered to have been exposed by statistical evidence, but those odds were on a completely different scale, 10^22:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU

Basically the mistake that is easy to make is that we shouldn't ask: "what is the probability that Hans plays five tournaments like that in a row?", but "what is the probability that someone will play five tournaments like that in a row?". Even if we correct for the fact that there are probably more Minecraft speedruns happening than GM tournaments, odds of 80k just seem a bit too low to call it evidence.

This seems interesting, any chess-knowing people willing to take the hit for the team and watch all 23 minutes?

Hard to cheat statistics.

This is how they find accounting fraud as well.

Since younger players are growing up and developing with these incredibly powerful chess engines, I wonder if that plays a role in their ability to play at such a level.

If this were the case, I think we'd see younger players more likely to get these 100s more often as they're learning from chess engines.

Does anyone familiarized with the topic know if this makes sense?

There's no smoking gun, but it's so blatantly obvious. Hans has floundered incredibly in postgame analysis after some of his recent wins, saying things like "I don't need to show variations" and "chess speaks for itself". For those who are not familiar, postgame analysis is where a player sits down with a commentator (often a retired GM) and discusses the key positions in the game. This universally involves describing the variations for a potential move, and explaining the logic for choosing a particular line. So his inability to speak coherently about a position where he won the match is perhaps the most glaring clue that his recent wins have not been earned.

I think you're uneasy because you're assuming the accusation of cheating has to do with the outcome of Hans's games but I don't believe that's the criterion Magnus is using. Magnus has been beaten many times before, but that doesn't automatically cause him to suspect his opponent of cheating. Magnus's suspicions arise from a sum of many different factors some of which he mentioned in this tweet and some of which he clearly can't talk about. If we judge people based on their past actions, their suspicious behaviour during the game or during the post-game analysis then it doesn't preclude the advancement of a legitimate genius player.

It's a little bit more complicated.

Magnus Carlsen didn't say Niemann cheated because he won but because he did so without being fully concentrated.

Zero tolerance blacklisting of cheaters is probably the best way forward. If neither Niemann nor Carlsen recant, then I predict chess will fall into general disrepute like baseball or billiards. The way for the professional chess community to salvage this situation is with zero tolerance blacklisting of anybody caught cheating, even as a teenager.

But he's not a known cheater!

He cheated as a minor in online play. He has never been shown to have cheated as an adult or in OTB play. Someone needs to prove one of those things before he can be blacklisted for being a cheater.

If someone makes a mistake at 16, is it a valid reason to ban a person for life?

Ok. If someone kills a person at 16. Should the killer be in prison for life?

To be fair to Hans, his claim is he cheated in a prize money tournament when he was 12. If he cheated in prize money games besides that it would be different, but I think most people are willing to forgive a 12 year old.

It is very unlikely a 2700 GM can beat Magnus on black pieces.

Moreover the live coverage showed an Hans way too relaxed about moves with 100% accuracy he was pulling.

He could also not give an explanation about of his moves in the game in an interview.

This, coupled with Magnus complaining about low security standards in the tournament make all the things very suspicious.

But you can't go about punishing him this way.

If FIDE or Chess.com or whoever wanted to ban him from events for his past behavior--or players simply wanted to ostracize him by refusing to play in tournaments with him--they needed to have banned/ostracized him for that behavior. I don't think anyone would complain if Niemann were caught cheating and then permanently banned. That's what Carlsen implies he's after and it's fine.

In contrast, this is "well, you cheated in the past, but we're going to let you play, unless you play really well, in which case we'll assume you cheated". This is just not a sane way to go about it, and creates the scenario in which Niemann is playing with a sort of externally-imposed skill cap. An accusation has to come with evidence specific to that accusation, not some hazy combination of past history + unease with his play. This all sounds like a slow-motion tantrum, which Carlsen can get away with because he's Magnus Carlsen.

I could also decide to cheat when being in the top players in the world. Even better, because I would only need to use my cheats sometimes and hide it even better because my knowledge holds up enough.

> Maybe Hans did cheat OTB, maybe he didn't, but the tough part about reputation is it is very hard to build and very easy to break.

The problem is this was true a month ago. And a year ago. And 2 years ago. If he should be banned by reputation then it should have already happened. If they do it now they just weaponize cheating accusations.

As an outsider to the chess world, this all seems like a roundabout way of saying "we have no evidence that he cheated, but in lieu of evidence let's go with gut feelings".

So you agree that Magnus is wrong and that Hans did not cheat in the OTB game.

And if you also agree with Magnus that cheating is a major problem then him singling out a single player who happened to beat him in OTB chess, as opposed to asking for wholesale changes for the past so many years to tackle cheating more seriously when he owns one of the top chess organizations and has partnerships with nearly every other chess organization, seems like him just being a sore loser.

I don’t need to defend Hans’s cheating to point out that Magnus’s response has been ridiculous because it’s entirely focused on 1 individual player as opposed to the actual large scale problem of cheating in chess. A guy who happened to beat him OTB in a game where he likely did not cheat at all.

>at least about the moves played

You missed a large part. Some of his moves were "somewhat suspect". However, he was interviewed after the game with Magnus and he really could not explain why he was making the moves he made. Even the interviewers were almost laughing as he gave his "analysis" for his own moves. He played off his top engine moves as just getting lucky, while at the same time stating he didn't make other moves because they would have weakened his position (when in fact it was the other way around), while also stating he made other moves to strengthen his position (when in fact it was weakening).

Nothing he said made sense. He is playing against the top players in the entire world, and he can't really describe his games. This is super genius territory, and yet he just claims his skills to mostly just be based on luck.

Not really.

If you think about it: Magnus, is Magnus. He has an aura about him. People make blunders playing against him they wouldn't against others. This is known. Magnus is ALSO very good. But that "aura"... doesn't hurt him.

If for whatever reason, Hans saw far enough ahead, to not be worried... and Magnus hadn't, what does that say about Magnus?

He mentioned Hans wasn't nervous, in comparison to Magnus he had nothing to lose.

I won't defend his prior cheating. I will say: Prove it Magnus.

---

I'll draw a parallel to a game I have played at the national / international level. Bridge.

Bridge has had a TON of cheating scandals. People knew something was fishy. But they took the time, watched the videos, and figured out what happened.

Recent ones during the time I played:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantoni_and_Nunes_cheating_sca...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_and_Schwartz_cheating_s...

A whole article on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_bridge

... I want the smoking gun Magnus. Not your gut.

The reasons Carlsen gives for being suspicious are not "the moves played were unusual" but about Niemann's behavior surrounding them.

And he wasn’t suspicious about his game when he beat Hans a few weeks earlier itself.

If Hans did go to all those extremes to cheat OTB it’s really surprising he would do so while playing black against Magnus Carlsen in an otherwise kind of pointless game.

It's a bit misleading to say that there was absolutely nothing unusual about the game. The Sinquefield game in question showed a very high correlation between engine optimal moves and the moves played by Niemann. His gameplay accuracy here is within the bounds of what the very top players can achieve in individual games, but high enough to raise some suspicion.

The next step is to place that mild suspicion in the context of both his history of admitted cheating, his unwillingness/inability to explain his remarkable moves post-game, and the additional context of many other games played in the last few years with _extraordinary_ accuracy. Now something that could be explained by just a very strong game appears very suspicious.

This is not true at all. For instance Nepominatchi commented on game saying Niemann's play was "more than impressive"[1]. Not commenting on the situation per se, merely your "clear consensus among other top chess players" comment.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPmminIC7g

Is there a good summary by a chess expert on how he may or may not have cheated? (Ideally a video).

Some other top chess players voiced strong suspicions regarding his post-match interview (including the interviewer), because he could not suggest basic lines in the post-match analysis, lines that even the interviewer could find without an engine (and for example Hikaru while watching the interview, being able to say the line instantly).

It seems not the moves are the problem but the lack of concentration to come up with them.

The cheating technique could be ingenious in itself. I remember what students were coming up in high-school, back in the day, without modern technology.

I feel similarly about a lot of games and sports as they're played at the very highest levels.

Scrabble is a fun game to play with kids, or sometimes with adults, and having a bigger vocabulary is an advantage. But competitive Scrabble means memorizing the dictionary of allowable Scrabble words. It's just a different game. There was the story a while back about the Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French but memorized French Scrabble words and won the French-language Scrabble World Championships: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378...

And that's fine - competition spurs invention to find any advantage possible. But to me it'd be more impressive to see someone play an obscure Scrabble world, and then when you ask what the word means, they're actually familiar with it, rather than "eh, it's in the word list".

> It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960

I mean chess960 seems to be on the up, no? FIDE had their first ever world champs only three years ago (where notably Carlsen still made it to the final, though did end up losing to Wesley So)

This is a weird criticism to me. It's like complaining that a karate master is just drilling the same moves over and over instead of coming up with moves in sparring, or complaining that a football team is rewatching old games to see what plays work instead of just coming up with plays on the field. The memorization and preparedness IS the intelligence, not the waste of it.

I have no idea about the main topic of this discussion.

But I did lose all interest in chess years ago when I realized the same thing: at the top level it's not about thinking but about memorizing (at the least) openings.

I believe go is too complex for the human mind to memorize strategies? Human mind, not computer.

> Magnus is not doing this in the best possible way.

You are assuming that his goal is to somehow uncover Hans cheating.

On the other hand if his goal is to highlight that in his opinion the security arrangements are not sufficient to be able to tell if an opponent is cheating or not, then he is doing that just right.

He spoke up and the competition in question introduced anti-cheating measures right the next day. That means there were things they could have been doing but were not before.

> Magnus should act and use his connections in the Chess world to catch him cheating.

How do you propose that could happen? Life is not a TV show with Perry Mason moments.

It's a fools errand to try to catch your opponent cheating, they may not be in fact cheating and you're stressing out making your game worse.

But general anti-cheating measures should be taken. What are those I don't know.

How do you think he can accomplish that exactly? You think they’re going to install hidden cameras everywhere?

Signing the letter with "Magnus Carlson - World Chess Champion" had bad optics IMO.

But why though?

Lets assume just for the sake of argument that Magnus has insider information from chess.com making him 98% certain that Niemann is cheating.

Why would he hand him a game that's going to be watched worldwide, where Magnus has nothing to win. Since if he wins we really still don't know anything one way or the other. But he also has everything to lose. If Hans is cheating and manages to pull off something again, then Magnus is cripeling his own reputation.

Magnus seems to be doing the right thing here, which is voicing his concerns, refusing to play him, and asking Niemann for permission to speak on the matter fully. Niemann is doing what you'd expect of a cheater, which is to stay quiet, dismiss the discussions, having difficulty explaining his plays, and pretty much just holding back from letting chess.com or Magnus divulge what information they have from the inside of his bans.

> If he did cheat it should be really obvious because his performance will suddenly drop

I mean, Magnus is so much more better player than Hans that even if Hans didn't cheat he would probably be worse in rematch. But in all sports sometimes underdogs win. In couple yt videos i watched it was said that Magnus played bad game and that Hans already gained an advantage in opening. Hans said that he prepared opening play but if he is indeed a cheater he maybe used engine just for opening. We'll probably never get an answer if there was cheating or not

Didn’t he play the remainder of the tournament he beat Magnus in, and proceed to lose six straight under heightened security against worse players?

If he were a computer, that would work. Being a human, the added stress of “this game will be used to decide whether I will be considered a cheater” may be enough to make him perform worse than he did before.